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Javier E

The Profound Contradiction of Saving Private Ryan - John Biguenet - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • a handpicked squad of Rangers are sent to extricate a paratrooper, James Ryan, from the intense fighting behind enemy lines because his three brothers have been killed in combat. Despite the efforts of his subordinates to dissuade him from authorizing the mission, General George C. Marshall determines to save Ryan's mother from a fourth telegram of condolence
  • The great bulk of dialogue in Saving Private Ryan not directly connected to the prosecution of battles is dedicated to an ongoing debate about the morality of the squad's mission. No one makes a case that their mission is heroic. It is idiocy and, as far as the soldiers are concerned, immoral idiocy.
  • Over and over again, the fundamental theorem of war—that one is sacrificed to save many—is examined
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  • Saving Private Ryan offers not a single word about love of country. Generals may still talk like their Civil War counterparts, but soldiers in the field have ceased to cloak their duty in such sentiments.
  • The mission can't be justified on moral or patriotic grounds, and yet the toughest soldier in the squad, Sergeant Horvath, says saving Private Ryan might be the one decent thing they "were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess."
  • Spielberg never suggests that we are any better than our enemy or, to put it more generously, that they are any worse than we are.
  • this is not a patriotic film; if anything, it argues that patriotism is beside the point in modern warfare. Even the mission itself has no heroic or patriotic aim; there is no hill to be taken, no redoubt to be stormed. Its goal, according to Captain Miller, is public relations.
  • there is no shortage of cruelty and brutality. Nazis move through battle-scarred streets indifferently finishing off wounded Americans, but, early in the film, we have witnessed callous GIs mowing down surrendering Germans with a laugh.
  • Schindler's List and Amistad are, in fact, about guilt and responsibility. They are not, as many imagine, noble memorials to the millions of victims of the Holocaust and slavery; rather, they are agonized meditations on all of those somehow implicated in those vast human tragedies.
  • How can the sentimental tableau of a weeping old man, his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his grandchildren possibly serve as a fit conclusion to so savage and unsentimental a film?
  • he described his father's own war stories: "I was supposed to wave the flag and be patriotic and say that without his efforts I wouldn't have the freedoms I had or even the freedom to have the bicycle I was riding." Only later did the director realize that it wasn't "a bunch of bunk he was telling me."
  • Private Ryan, a dazed kid surrounded by the bodies of men who were absurdly ordered to their deaths to save him, is given the equally absurd command by the dying hero, Captain Miller, to "earn this" and must now bear the terrible, impossible order until his own death.
  • at the end of Saving Private Ryan, as a grandfather and his son and grandchildren pay homage to those whose deaths we have just witnessed, the living are called not merely to bear witness to the achievement of fallen heroes; the living are, in fact, the achievement itself. Like Private Ryan, we cannot help but ask what we've done to deserve such sacrifice by others and beg their forgiveness for what we have cost them. And like James Ryan, all we can do to justify that sacrifice is to live our lives as well as we are able.
  • Saving Private Ryan is not about those who suffered; it is about those who have been spared suffering. Spielberg's subject, in the end, is not the courage of the soldiers who fought at Normandy; his subject is the debt owed them by their children and their children's children.
Javier E

In Los Angeles, a Nimby Battle Pits Millionaires vs. Billionaires - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • the ever-expanding number of houses the size of Hyatt resorts rising in the most expensive precincts of Los Angeles
  • “Twenty-thousand-square-foot homes have become teardowns for people who want to build 70-, 80-, and 90,000-square-foot homes,” Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz said. So long, megamansion. Say hello to the gigamansion.
  • Why are people building houses the size of shopping malls? Because they can. “Why do you see a yacht 500 feet long when you could easily have the same fun in one half the size?”
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  • the market for these Versailles knockoffs is “flight capital.” “It’s oligarchs, oilgarchs, people from Asia, people who came up with the next app for the iPhone,” he said. While global wealth is pouring into other American cities as well, Los Angeles is still a relative bargain, Mr. Hyland said, adding: “Here you can buy the best house for $3,000 a square foot. In Manhattan, you’re looking at $11,000 a square foot and you get a skybox.”
  • In a city traditionally as hostile to architectural preservation as it is hospitable to architectural innovation, the gigamansion trend is accelerating the decimation of residential gems. A midcentury modern home in Bel Air designed by Burton Schutt (best known as the architect of the Hotel Bel-Air) and furnished by the decorator Billy Haines for Earle Jorgensen, a member of President Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet,” and his wife, Marion, was recently razed
  • In the Sunset Strip area, a geometric hacienda built by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta for the actor Ricardo Montalbán was “remodeled” into a hulking glass spec house.
  • As the number of Los Angeles’s buildable lots dwindles and land values soar, houses that are out of scale with their surroundings are popping up everywhere. (
mollyharper

Saudi activist to be flogged in public, Amnesty International says - CNN.com - 0 views

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    Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes and a fine of 1 million Saudi Arabian riyals (approximately $267,000) in May 2014 by a Saudi court accusing him of insulting Islam, said his wife and a source who followed the case closely.
Javier E

Simon Heffer Battles Historians about the First World War | New Republic - 0 views

  • Now no one is alive who served in the trenches or on a dreadnought, and the reliance is entirely upon documents, there can be, paradoxically, far more rigour in the analysis, as sources are tested against each other, and the unreliability of active memory ceases to intrude.
  • Few historians have the range of specialisms needed, at least in the depth to which each is required, to tell the whole story,
  • First, an understanding of the history of power, international relations since (at least) the Congress of Berlin and of European diplomacy is required to illuminate the catastrophe of August 1914.
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  • One also requires
  • knowledge of the political heritage and divisions in certain countries that played a leading role in the drama
  • The historiography of the war began when the war did. On the most basic level there was a running commentary in the press. Further up the scale of debate and analysis, Oxford University Press quickly published Why We Are At War
  • there is the question of life away from the front. The political pressures and civilian unrest that led to the dissolution of first the Romanov, and then the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires in 1917-18 say as much about the effect of the war and its pervasive influence in the ensuing decades as the final outcome itself.
  • Second, one needs the skills of the advanced military historian not simply to outline strategy and tactics after war breaks out, and to recount the movements of troops and the joining of battle, but also to link these with the political direction (or, sometimes, lack of it) of the chancelleries of Europ
  • The book went through several editions in the first few months of the conflict as governments made available correspondence and documents that presented each nation’s justification for its course of action – Britain’s Blue Book, the German White Book, the Russian Orange Book and the Belgian Grey Book.
  • Of the general histories still read today the first truly rigorous one that probed more deeply was Captain Basil Liddell Hart’s. He was a veteran of the Somme; his The Real War was published in 1930 and is still in print today under the title History of the First World War.
  • Wars are fought in cabinet rooms as well as on battlefields, and Repington’s eyewitness accounts of both make his book an essential source today. He was also the man who first used the term “the First World War”, in September 1918: not so much to coin a phrase to describe a conflict involving international empires and, since the previous year, America, but to warn that there might one day be a second one. 
  • The modern school of First World War history has its origins in the 1960s, at around the time of the 50th anniversary of the conflict. It is from this time onwards that popular history – that is, books written with the intention of being read by an intelligent general public, rather than just a small circle of elevated academics – begins to evolve to its present sophisticated state, and standards of scholarship rise considerably
  • the new vogue for popular history of the First World War began with a book that displays none of these qualities – Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, published in 1961.
  • Sir Michael Howard called it “worthless” as history because of its “slovenly scholarship”. Unlike later historians, Clark did not attempt to explore whether there might be two sides to the story of apparently weak British generalship.
  • The book is a clever piece of propaganda and manipulation of (usually) the truth, and its revisionism created an entirely new view of the war and how it was fought. It is, however, a view that more reputable historians have sought to correct for the past half-century.
  • The BBC’s landmark documentary series of 1964, entitled The Great War, stimulated great interest in the subject, not least because of the realisation that the generation that survived it was beginning to die. The series filmed numerous veterans and prompted a vogue for oral history; the Imperial War Museum undertook an enormous, and hugely valuable, project. For the rest of that generation’s life oral history was given more emphasis than documentary records
  • In America, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August had appeared in 1962. George Malcolm Thomson covered similar ground in his highly acclaimed The Twelve Days, published in 1964, a detailed account of the diplomatic activity between 24 July and 4 August 1914.
  • A J P Taylor, the highest-profile historian of the time, published in 1969 War by Timetable, which argued that the mobilisation timetables of all the great powers – whose generals had prided themselves on being able to mobilise faster than their potential enemies – led to an inevitable drift towards a war no one actually wanted.
  • led to the birth of the two rival schools of thought that have dominated the study of the war in recent years: one that says Germany was hell-bent on world domination, the other that says the war happened by accident.
  • In 1998 two serious British historians of different generations published authoritative histories of the conflict. Sir John Keegan’s The First World Warwas based almost entirely on secondary sources, but written with a measured expertise that made it the perfect entry-level guide to the fighting, taking into account almost all of the scholarship since 1914
  • Professor Niall Ferguson’sThe Pity of War was a different beast; a more political book, making greater use of primary sources, and offering a more controversial judgement: that the kaiser had not wanted war, and Britain’s security did not rely on Germany’s defeat.
  • The next great landmark of British war studies – and in one respect the most frustrating – was the first volume of Sir Hew Strachan’s The First World War, published in 2001
  • The anniversary has prompted not just more publications, but also a renewed argument about the necessity of fighting such a horrendous conflict.
  • In a magisterial review in the Times Literary Supplement last autumn of Sir Max’s and two other books – Professor Margaret MacMillan’s bizarrely titled but widely acclaimed The War That Ended Peace and Brigadier Allan Mallinson’s 1914: Fight the Good Fight – William Philpott, professor of the history of warfare in the world-renowned war studies department at King’s College London, drew some distinctions between rigorous and populist histor
  • Of all the recent works of history, one stands far above all others, and should be regarded as an indispensable read for anyone who wishes to understand why the war happened: Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers, published in 2012
  • relying on a grasp of the main languages involved and a serious study of foreign archives, Clark gets to the heart of the two principal questions: why Gavrilo Princip felt moved to shoot Franz Ferdinand and his wife when they went to Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, and why the ensuing quarrel could not be contained to one between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. After much inquiry, presentation of evidence and discussion, he reaches a judgement: that the kaiser didn’t want war, and that a war occurred was largely down to the bellicosity, incompetence and weaknesses of others.
  • I suspect that Clark’s view will gain more adherents, not least as a more nuanced and thoughtful understanding of this abominable conflict becomes more possible now that those who remember it are dead
blaise_glowiak

On Charlie Hebdo Pope Francis is using the wife-beater's defence | Polly Toynbee | Comm... - 0 views

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    Pope Francis speaks on free speech in relation to faith.
sgardner35

Historic protests convulse Mexico - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam had just revealed that authorities believe 43 missing students were kidnapped, executed and dumped in a river -- and he was ready to call it a day.
  • It's one of the most serious cases in the contemporary history of Mexico and Latin America
  • . He compared it to a massacre of students during a Mexico City demonstration in 1968.
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  • "an act of this magnitude" unfolding "in view of all Mexicans, the international community and the media" has caught so much attention
  • Authorities say the students were abducted by police on order of a local mayor, then turned over to a gang that's believed to have killed them and burned their bodies before throwing some remains in a river.
  • It's not the first time the President, who represents the Institutional Revolutionary Party that once ruled Mexico for more than 70 years, has faced allegations of government corruption and accusations the government is too slow to fight crime.
  • rgency
  • rgenc
  • New video of missing Mexican students "These are the people that are screwing over the country," they chanted. Protesters clashed with police at Acapulco's airport on Monday, crippling the airport for hours and forcing the cancellation of several flights. Mexico's President has also said he's outraged about the students' case, but he's condemned the protest violence. And some have expressed skepticism that protesters are truly concerned about what happened to the students, accusing them of exploiting the situation for political reasons. Protesters condemn what they call inaction by the government. "There is a national e
  • On Friday, protesters marching in Mexico City carried posters saying, "Enough, I'm tired." Others held signs saying, "It was the state."
  • Mexican news website Aristegui Noticias over the weekend alleged that Mexico's President and his wife have been living in a lavish $7 million mansion owned by a contractor that's won lucrative government projects.
  • "People in Mexico are taking to the streets yesterday, today and just about every day for the last month, demanding not only clearing up this particular crime
  • He said he had just spoken with the missing students' parents, and told them what he later told reporters -- that officials believe the students' remains were thrown in the river, but they don't yet have DNA proof.
qkirkpatrick

BBC News - Jason Rezaian: Iran to try Washington Post reporter - 0 views

  • A Washington Post journalist detained for almost six months in Iran is to stand trial on unspecified charges.
  • Mr Rezaian, who holds dual US-Iranian citizenship, was arrested with his wife and two associates in July.
  • In December, Mr Rezaian was brought before a judge in the Iranian capital to hear charges officially levelled against him and was denied a request for bail.
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  • The US state department has repeatedly raised the subject of Mr Rezaian's detention during negotiations with Iranian officials over the country's nuclear programme.
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    A dual US-Iranian citizen and reporter for the Washington Post was arrested 6 months ago in Iran is facing trial
Javier E

The Legacy of Malcolm X - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Gripping and inconsistent myths swirl about him. In one telling, Malcolm is a hate-filled bigot, who through religion came to see the kinship of all. In another he is the self-redeemer, a lowly pimp become an exemplar of black chivalry. In still another he is an avatar of collective revenge, a gangster whose greatest insight lay in changing not his ways, but his targets. The layers, the contradictions, the sheer profusion of Malcolm X’s public pronouncements have been a gift to seemingly every contemporary black artist and intellectual from Kanye to Cornel West.
  • For me, he embodied the notion of an individual made anew through his greater commitment to a broad black collective.
  • I thought back on the debate running from Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and I knew a final verdict had been reached. Who could look on a black family that had won the votes, if not the hearts, of Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina, waving to their country and bounding for the White House, and seriously claim, as Malcolm once did, that blacks were not American?
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  • As surely as 2008 was made possible by black people’s long fight to be publicly American, it was also made possible by those same Americans’ long fight to be publicly black. That latter fight belongs especially to one man, as does the sight of a first family bearing an African name. Barack Obama is the president. But it’s Malcolm X’s America.
  • Marable’s biography judiciously sifts fact from myth. Marable’s Malcolm is trapped in an unhappy marriage, cuckolded by his wife and one of his lieutenants. His indignation at Elijah Muhammad’s womanizing is fueled by his morals, and by his resentment that one of the women involved is an old flame. He can be impatient and petulant. And his behavior, in his last days, casts a shadow over his reputation as an ascetic. He is at times anti-Semitic, sexist, and, without the structure of the Nation, inefficient.
  • Marable reveals Malcolm to be, in many ways, an awkward fit for the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad’s Nation combined the black separatism of Marcus Garvey with Booker T. Washington’s disdain for protest. In practice, its members were conservative, stressing moral reform, individual uplift, and entrepreneurship. Malcolm was equally devoted to reform, but he believed that true reform ultimately had radical implications.
  • His energy left him with a sprawling web of ties, ranging from the deeply personal (Louis Farrakhan) to the deeply cynical (George Lincoln Rockwell). He allied with A. Philip Randolph and Fannie Lou Hamer, romanced the Saudi royal family, and effectively transformed himself into black America’s ambassador to the developing world.
  • To Marable’s credit, he does not judge Malcolm’s significance by his seeming failure to forge a coherent philosophy. As Malcolm traveled to Africa and the Middle East, as he debated at Oxford and Harvard, he encountered a torrent of new ideas, new ways of thinking that batted him back and forth. He never fully gave up his cynical take on white Americans, but he did broaden his views, endorsing interracial marriage and ruing the personal coldness he’d shown toward whites. Yet Malcolm’s political vision was never complete like that of Martin Luther King, who hewed faithfully to his central principle, the one he is known for today—his commitment to nonviolence.
  • For all of Malcolm’s prodigious intellect, he was ultimately more an expression of black America’s heart than of its brain.
  • The fact and wisdom of nonviolence may be beyond dispute—the civil-rights movement profoundly transformed the country. Yet the movement demanded of African Americans a superhuman capacity for forgiveness. Dick Gregory summed up the dilemma well. “I committed to nonviolence,” Marable quotes him as saying. “But I’m sort of embarrassed by it.”
  • Like Malcolm, Obama was a wanderer who found himself in the politics of the black community, who was rooted in a nationalist church that he ultimately outgrew. Like Malcolm’s, his speeches to black audiences are filled with exhortations to self-creation, and draw deeply from his own biography
  • perhaps most significantly, it rejected the beauty standard of others and erected a new one. In a 1962 rally, Malcolm said: Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind?
  • Virtually all of black America has been, in some shape or form, touched by that rebirth. Before Malcolm X, the very handle we now embrace—black—was an insult. We were coloreds or Negroes, and to call someone “black” was to invite a fistfight. But Malcolm remade the menace inherent in that name into something mystical—Black Power; Black Is Beautiful; It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.
  • For all of Malcolm’s invective, his most seductive notion was that of collective self-creation: the idea that black people could, through force of will, remake themselves
  • Marable details how Malcolm was, by the end of his life, perhaps evolving away from his hyper-moral persona. He drinks a rum and Coke and allows himself a second meal a day. Marable suspects he carried out an affair or two, one with an 18-year-old convert to the Nation. But in the public mind, Malcolm rebirthed himself as a paragon of righteousness, and even in Marable’s retelling he is obsessed with the pursuit of self-creation. That pursuit ended when Malcolm was killed by the very Muslims from whom he once demanded fealty.
  • Some of its most prominent public faces—Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, O. J. Simpson—have in varying degrees proved themselves all too human. Against that backdrop, there is Malcolm. Tall, gaunt, and handsome, clear and direct, Malcolm was who you wanted your son to be. Malcolm was, as Joe Biden would say, clean, and he took it as his solemn, unspoken duty never to embarrass you.
  • It’s his abiding advocacy for blackness, not as a reason for failure, but as a mandate for personal, and ultimately collective, improvement that makes him compelling. Always lurking among Malcolm’s condemnations of white racism was a subtler, and more inspiring, notion—“You’re better than you think you are,” he seemed to say to us. “Now act like it.”
  • Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as “our living, black manhood” and “our own black shining prince.” Only one man today could bear those twin honorifics: Barack Obama
  • But the enduring appeal of Malcolm’s message, the portion that reaches out from the Audubon Ballroom to the South Lawn, asserts the right of a people to protect and improve themselves by their own hand. In Malcolm’s time, that message rejected the surrender of the right to secure your own body.
  • What animated Malcolm’s rage was that for all his intellect, and all his ability, and all his reinventions, as a black man in America, he found his ambitions ultimately capped. The right of self-creation had its limits then. But not anymore. Obama became a lawyer, and created himself as president, out of a single-parent home and illicit drug use.
jlessner

Step One to Fighting Ebola? Start with Corruption - 0 views

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    The story of the current Ebola pandemic appears still in its opening chapter. Will the virus be contained, or will it spread its horror across Africa and beyond? The question is being raised around many family tables, including ours, particularly as my wife and I and our three small children, New Yorkers, live in Rwanda where I work in public health and she operates a job training program and a gourmet restaurant.
Javier E

G.O.P.'s Israel Support Deepens as Political Contributions Shift - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • few candidates have benefited as much as Mr. Cotton.
  • Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group, said this relatively small group of very wealthy Jewish-Americans distorted the views among Jews nationwide who remain supportive of the Democratic Party and a more nuanced relationship with Israel.
  • “The very, very limited set of people who do their politics simply through the lens of Israel — that small group is tilting more heavily Republican now,” he said, adding, “But it is dangerous for American politics as too many people do not understand that of the six million American Jews, this is only a handful.”
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  • “Israel did not traditionally represent that kind of emotional focus for any element of the Republican Party,” he said. “But the feeling now is that it is a winning issue, as it helps them to appear strong on foreign policy.”
  • the most significant contributor by far to Republican supporters of Israel has been Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, who with his wife has invested at least $100 million in conservative causes over the last four years. A large chunk was spent on the 2012 presidential campaign, but Senate Republicans also benefited, and could soon again, particularly those considering a run for president.
  • The shift has also meant the Republican Party today accepts little dissent on the topic of Israel, said Scott McConnell, a founding editor of The American Conservative, an outcome he believes is in part driven by the demands of financial supporters.“Republicans interested in foreign policy used to understand that it was not in America’s national interest to ignore entirely Arab claims against Israel,” he said. “Now, there is a fanatical feeling of one-sidedness.”
Javier E

How Much Do Black Lives Matter to the Presidential Campaign? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • the public has become more adverse to the use of force by government. The most obvious example, he wrote in response to my email inquiry, is war
  • Pinker cited 13 other examples in support of his position that people have become less tolerant of violence, including “concern over police violence. During the 1960s race riots, police would kill dozens of young black men in a single night, but the public barely noticed”; “Capital punishment is on the way out”; “Domestic violence (e.g., wife-beating) used to be a joke (as in Jackie Gleason’s “One of these days, Alice – Pow! Right in the kisser”), now it is an abomination”; “Corporal punishment (strapping and paddling) are on their way out of American schools”; “Bullying in the playground, once thought to be a normal or even desirable feature of boyhood, has become a national issue”; and “American football may soon be revolutionized by concern about concussions.”
  • Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at N.Y.U., noted in an email that for liberals, “compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue.” Conservatives, in contrast, “believe more in ‘just deserts’ and making criminals pay.”
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  • A study of responses from white male liberals and white male conservatives found that some of the biggest differences were in response to certain statements. Liberal men responded favorably to: “I believe offenders should be provided with counseling in aid of their rehabilitation” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” Conservative men agreed with the statements: “I believe ‘an eye for an eye’ is the correct philosophy behind punishing offenders” and “It feels wrong when a person commits a crime and goes unpunished.
  • Historically, the crime issue has been a winner for Republicans and a loser for Democrats. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush all profited from portraying their Democratic adversaries as soft on crime and, at an international level, not sufficiently resolute in fighting terrorism. (Before that, accusations of being “soft on communism” were a winning gambit for Republicans.)
  • Allen Matusow, a professor of history at Rice, is the author of “The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s,” which chronicled the damage suffered by the political left at a time of riots and rising crime rates. He wrote in an email that he worriesabout the ability of the right to make a few videos and turn some portion of the amorphous middle in the direction of the police. I have acquired great respect for the ability of bad men to manipulate the public.
  • The critical factor that will test the viability of the Democratic Party’s liberalized stance on law enforcement and incarceration will be the trends in crime and arrests over the next 12 months leading up to the Election Day.
  • If the crime rate for 2015 and 2016 remains as low as during 2014, it will minimize blowback against Clinton’s stands in favor of minimizing incarceration, and, for that matter, against the Obama administration’s decision to release more than 6000 federal drug nonviolent offenders.
  • If, however, crime rates shoot up and arrest rates drop in response to less vigorous law enforcement, as advocates of the “Ferguson effect” theory suggest, Democrats risk a repetition of events in the mid and late 1960s.
  • This points to one of the paradoxes confronting liberalism: the legislative reform agenda of the left, whether it’s criminal law or reducing unemployment, stands the best chance of passage when the need is small: in good times of high prosperity, lots of jobs, rising pay and declining crime rates. Voters are most generous when they are least threatened and least generous when most threatened.
silveiragu

I Miss Barack Obama - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As this primary season has gone along, a strange sensation has come over me: I miss Barack Obama
  • Now, obviously I disagree with a lot of Obama’s policy decisions.
  • But over the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply.
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  • The first and most important of these is basic integrity
  • He and his wife have not only displayed superior integrity themselves, they have mostly attracted and hired people with high personal standards.
  • all sorts of unsightly characters floating around politics, including in the Clinton camp and in Gov. Chris Christie’s administration
  • Second, a sense of basic humanity.
  • Donald Trump has spent much of this campaign vowing to block Muslim immigration. You can only say that if you treat Muslim Americans as an abstraction. President Obama, meanwhile, went to a mosque, looked into people’s eyes and gave a wonderful speech reasserting their place as Americans.
  • Imagine if Barack and Michelle Obama joined the board of a charity
  • You’d be happy to have such people in your community. Could you say that comfortably about Ted Cruz?
  • Third, a soundness in his decision-making process.
  • Take health care. Passing Obamacare was a mighty lift that led to two gigantic midterm election defeats.
  • Sanderscare would take employer coverage away from tens of millions of satisfied customer
  • This is epic social disruption
  • Fourth, grace under pressure.
  • Fifth, a resilient sense of optimism
  • To hear Sanders or Trump, Cruz and Ben Carson campaign is to wallow in the pornography of pessimism, to conclude that this country is on the verge of complete collapse.
  • But there is a tone of ugliness creeping across the world, as democracies retreat, as tribalism mounts, as suspiciousness and authoritarianism take center stage.Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him.
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    Interesting as we study governmental crises in history to consider the popular and political usage of the term. 
katyshannon

Apple Fights Order to Unlock San Bernardino Gunman's iPhone - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Last month, some of President Obama’s top intelligence advisers met in Silicon Valley with Apple’s chief, Timothy D. Cook, and other technology leaders in what seemed to be a public rapprochement in their long-running dispute over the encryption safeguards built into their devices.
  • But behind the scenes, relations were tense, as lawyers for the Obama administration and Apple held closely guarded discussions for over two months about one particularly urgent case: The F.B.I. wanted Apple to help “unlock” an iPhone used by one of the two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December, but Apple was resisting.
  • When the talks collapsed, a federal magistrate judge, at the Justice Department’s request, ordered Apple to bypass security functions on the phone.
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  • The order set off a furious public battle on Wednesday between the Obama administration and one of the world’s most valuable companies in a dispute with far-reaching legal implications.
  • This is not the first time a technology company has been ordered to effectively decrypt its own product. But industry experts say it is the most significant because of Apple’s global profile, the invasive steps it says are being demanded and the brutality of the San Bernardino attacks.
  • Law enforcement officials who support the F.B.I.’s position said that the impasse with Apple provided an ideal test case to move from an abstract debate over the balance between national security and privacy to a concrete one
  • The F.B.I. has been unable to get into the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who was killed by the police along with his wife after they attacked Mr. Farook’s co-workers at a holiday gathering.
  • Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the District of Central California issued her order Tuesday afternoon, after the F.B.I. said it had been unable to get access to the data on its own and needed Apple’s technical assistance.
  • Mr. Cook, the chief executive at Apple, responded Wednesday morning with a blistering, 1,100-word letter to Apple customers, warning of the “chilling” breach of privacy posed by the government’s demands. He maintained that the order would effectively require it to create a “backdoor” to get around its own safeguards, and Apple vowed to appeal the ruling by next week.
  • Apple argues that the software the F.B.I. wants it to create does not exist. But technologists say the company can do it.
  • pple executives had hoped to resolve the impasse without having to rewrite their own encryption software. They were frustrated that the Justice Department had aired its demand in public, according to an industry executive with knowledge of the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal discussions.
  • The dispute could initiate legislation in Congress, with Republicans and Democrats alike criticizing Apple’s stance on Wednesday and calling for tougher decryption requirements.
  • His vote of confidence was significant because James Comey, the F.B.I. director, has at times been at odds with the White House over his aggressive advocacy of tougher decryption requirements on technology companies. While Mr. Obama’s national security team was sympathetic to Mr. Comey’s position, others at the White House viewed legislation as potentially perilous. Late last year, Mr. Obama refused to back any legislation requiring decryption, leaving a court fight likely.
  • The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have the White House’s “full support,” the spokesman, Josh Earnest, said on Wednesday.
  • Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential contender, also attacked Apple on Fox News, asking, “Who do they think they are?”
  • But Apple had many defenders of its own among privacy and consumer advocates, who praised Mr. Cook for standing up to what they saw as government overreach.
  • Many of the company’s defenders argued that the types of government surveillance operations exposed in 2013 by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, have prompted technology companies to build tougher encryption safeguards in their products because of the privacy demands of their customers.
  • Privacy advocates and others said they worried that if the F.B.I. succeeded in getting access to the software overriding Apple’s encryption, it would create easy access for the government in many future investigations.
  • The Apple order is a flash point in a dispute that has been building for more than a decade. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • The F.B.I. began sounding alarms years ago about technology that allowed people to exchange private messages protected by encryption so strong that government agents could not break it. In fall 2010, at the behest of Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, the Obama administration began work on a law that required technology companies to provide unencrypted data to the government.
  • Lawyers at the F.B.I., Justice Department and Commerce Department drafted bills around the idea that technology companies in the Internet age should be bound by the same rules as phone companies, which were forced during the Clinton administration to build digital networks that government agents could tap.
  • The draft legislation would have covered app developers like WhatsApp and large companies like Google and Apple, according to current and former officials involved in the process.
  • There is no debate that, when armed with a court order, the government can get text messages and other data stored in plain text. Far less certain was whether the government could use a court order to force a company to write software or redesign its system to decode encrypted data. A federal law would make that authority clear, they said.
  • But the disclosures of government surveillance by Mr. Snowden changed the privacy debate, and the Obama administration decided not to move on the proposed legislation. It has not been revived.
  • The legal issues raised by the judge’s order are complicated. They involve statutory interpretation, rather than constitutional rights, and they could end up before the Supreme Court.
  • As Apple noted, the F.B.I., instead of asking Congress to pass legislation resolving the encryption fight, has proposed what appears to be a novel reading of the All Writs Act of 1789.
  • The law lets judges “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”
rachelramirez

Trump University's Shady Faculty - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • Photo Illustration by The Daily Beastwritten by
  • The Shady Faculty of Trump University
  • According to seminar transcripts filed in one class-action lawsuit against Trump University and reviewed by The Daily Beast, Harris told students that at 19, he found himself homeless and was forced to seek shelter in the grimy New York City subway. But his life changed, he said, when he met a “nice gentleman” who taught him about the real estate business.
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  • Despite becoming the top instructor at an institution that billed itself as a university, he didn’t have a background in education or even, according to his story, a college degree.
  • When he was hired in 2008, he was already a convicted felon—for aggravated assault, recent depositions in the Trump University case reveal. And according to 2011 divorce filings in Gwinnett County, Georgia, Harris threatened to kill his ex-wife and tried to have her Range Rover repossessed the day after she filed for a restraining order.
  • The school, which has been defunct since 2011, is currently the subject of two class-action lawsuits in California and a $40 million suit brought by Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General from New York.
  • Trump University began in earnest on May 23, 2005, a for-profit venture with a website, TrumpUniversity.com, and a collection of courses—on entrepreneurship, real estate, and marketing—available on CD-ROM for $300 a pop.
  • From the outset, Trump University’s roster of brainy professors was a selling point. In a promotional video
  • Sonny Low, who paid $25,000 for a Trump mentorship in 2010, reported that Nowlin didn’t even “appear knowledgeable” about real estate or investing, according to one class-action lawsuit against Trump University.
  • Attendees were required to sign a waiver promising not to sue the company if they later faced legal troubles, the Enquirer reported.
  • Students started with a $1,495 three-day seminar, before some instructors, according to court papers, goaded them into buying mentorship packages totaling up to $34,995.
  • The lawsuits against Trump University claim some pupils, encouraged to increase their credit limits and to max out their credit cards, paid twice as much.
  • Trump decided to go in another direction, according to Schank. There would be no more online courses, no more lectures from ivy league professors, no more books—just seminars, with speakers like Harris
  • On social media, he posed for photos in a plush, white bathrobe on a manicured lawn, flanked by a shiny silver Hummer and Mercedes-Benz. He told students they could live like him, too, and vowed to teach them to earn $25,000 a month, according to court filings.
  • At some point, Harris was also employed by Armando Montelongo Seminars, a venture similar to Trump University and also facing lawsuits from disgruntled students who claim they were scammed.
sgardner35

Nancy Reagan, an Influential and Protective First Lady, Dies at 94 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Nancy Reagan, the influential and stylish wife of the 40th president of the United States who unabashedly put Ronald Reagan at the center of her life but became a political figure in her own right, died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94.
  • President Obama said on Sunday that Mrs. Reagan “had redefined the role” of first lady, adding, “Later, in her long goodbye with President Reagan, she became a voice on behalf of millions of families going through the depleting, aching reality of Alzheimer’s, and took on a new role, as advocate, on behalf of treatments that hold the potential and the promise to improve and save lives.”
  • Behind the scenes, Mrs. Reagan was the prime mover in Mr. Reagan’s efforts to recover from the scandal, which was known as Iran-contra because some of the proceeds from the sale had been diverted to the contras opposing the leftist government of Nicaragua. While trying to persuade her stubborn husband to apologize for the arms deal, Mrs. Reagan brought political figures into the White House, among them the Democratic power broker Robert S. Strauss, to argue her case to the president.
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  • He reciprocated in kind. “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold?” he once said. “Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.”
  • But this was a convention in a day when women were not encouraged to have careers outside the home. In his book “Reagan’s America: Innocents At Home,” Garry Wills disputed the prevalent view that Miss Davis had just been marking time in Hollywood while waiting for a man. She was “the steady woman,” he wrote, who in most of her 11 films had held her own with accomplished actors.
  • In the late 1940s, Hollywood was in the grip of a “Red Scare,” prompted by government investigations into accusations of Communist influence in the film industry. In October 1949, the name “Nancy Davis” appeared in a Hollywood newspaper on a list of signers of a supporting brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of two screenwriters who had been blacklisted after being found guilty of contempt for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.Such newspaper mentions could mean the end of a career, and Nancy Davis sought help from her friend Mervyn LeRoy, who had directed her in “East Side, West Side.” LeRoy found it was a case of mistaken identity: another Nancy Davis had worked in what he called “leftist theater.” He offered to call Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, to make sure there would be no problems in the future. Instead, Miss Davis insisted that LeRoy set up a meeting with Mr. Reagan.
  • From the first, Mrs. Reagan was part of the campaign planning. “They were a team,” said Stuart Spencer, who with Bill Roberts managed the Reagan campaign. New to politics, she said little at first. But Mr. Spencer found her “a quick learner, always absorbing.” Before long she was peppering Mr. Roberts and Mr. Spencer about their strategy and tactics.
  • The mansion episode, and Mrs. Reagan’s unalloyed preference for Southern California, aroused parochial resentment in Sacramento. She in turn disliked the city’s locker-room political culture, which required her to socialize with the wives of legislators who had insulted her husband. She bristled at press scrutiny, which became more intense after Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote an unflattering article, “Pretty Nancy,” in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968. The article described Mrs. Reagan’s famous smile as a study in frozen insecurity.
  • Mr. Reagan decided to debate and did so well that he surged ahead in the polls and won convincingly a week later.
  • After the assassination attempt, Mrs. Reagan turned to Joan Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer, who claimed to have predicted that March 30 would be a “bad day” for the president. Her relationship with Ms. Quigley “began as a crutch,” Mrs. Reagan wrote, “one of several ways I tried to alleviate my anxiety about Ronnie.” Within a year, it was a habit. Mrs. Reagan conversed with Ms. Quigley by telephone and passed on the information she received about favorable and unfavorable days to Mr. Deaver, the presidential assistant, and later to the White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, for use in scheduling.
  • Mr. Regan disclosed Mrs. Reagan’s astrological bent in his 1988 book, “For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington,” asserting that the Quigley information created a chaotic situation for White House schedulers. Mrs. Reagan said that no political decisions had been made based on the astrologist’s advice, nor did Mr. Regan allege that any had been.But the disc
  • losure was nonetheless embarrassing to Mrs. Reagan; she and many commentators saw it as an act of revenge for the role she had played in forcing Mr. Regan out after the Iran-contra disclosures. Mrs. Reagan’s low opinion of Mr. Regan was well known; she had said tartly that he “liked the sound of chief but not of staff.”
johnsonma23

Nancy Reagan dies in Los Angeles at 94: Former first lady was President Reagan's closes... - 0 views

  • Nancy Reagan dies in Los Angeles at 94: Former first lady was President Reagan's closest advisor
  • First Lady Nancy Davis Reagan, whose devotion to her husband made her a formidable behind-the-scenes player in his administrations and one of the most influential presidential wives in modern times, died Sunday of congestive heart failure, her office said
  • Although Reagan pursued some programs of her own as first lady, she considered her most important role promoting the political, physical and mental well-being of Ronald Reagan.
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  • One of the 20th century’s most popular presidents, Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, was nicknamed the “Teflon president” because of his ability to deflect almost any controversy or criticism. But his wife was the “flypaper first lady,” as longtime advisor Michael Deaver once quipped, because nearly everything negative stuck to her.
  • “Reagan knew where he wanted to go,”
  • “but she had a better sense of what he needed to do to get there.”
  • Particularly tough-minded on the hiring and firing of key staffers and Cabinet members, she often played bad cop to his good cop, forcing difficult decisions that the famously easygoing chief executive was loath to make.
  • she also became a vocal advocate of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, which Bush opposed despite scientists’ belief that it could lead to cures for incapacitating diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
  • Her good deeds were barely noticed. She championed the Foster Grandparent Program, a cause she would continue to promote in Washington. She took a special interest in Vietnam veterans, hosting emotional dinners for returning prisoners of war and sitting at the bedsides of young soldiers at the veteran’s hospital in Westwood.
  • During her husband’s second term in Sacramento, she raised $1 million from Republican donors to build a new governor’s mansion on a scenic site above the American River in nearby Carmichael.
  • “Virtually everything I did during that first year was misunderstood and ridiculed,” Reagan complained in “My Turn.”
  • “She was the personnel director of the Reagan operation, so to speak,”
  • She was widely credited with forcing the departures of several high-level administration figures, including Interior Secretary James Watt, Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler and two national security advisors, Richard V. Allen and William Clark.
johnsonma23

O.J. Simpson Prosecutor Marcia Clark: If Trial Were Held Today, It'd Probably Be Hung J... - 0 views

  • O.J. Simpson Prosecutor Marcia Clark: If Trial Were Held Today, It'd Probably Be Hung Jury
  • The Los Angeles prosecutor who tried and failed to convict O.J. Simpson says the infamous murder trial would probably end in a hung jury if it were held today.
  • Because in the wake of all these police shootings and all the racial mistrust that has been exposed, probably what would result, in my opinion, is a hung jury."
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  • Clark has long contended that wariness of the Los Angeles Police Department and anger over the brutal Rodney King beating figured in the acquittal of Simpson after a five-month trial in 1995 that transfixed the world.
  • Clark said prosecutors amassed a "mountain of evidence" pointing to Simpson's guilt in the killings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman.
  • "They didn't care whether he was guilty or innocent," she told Dateline's Josh Mankiewicz. "They were going to use this case for payback."
  • , 'I'm not black, I'm O.J.,'"
  • s not exactly your civil rights firebrand."
  • "But at the end of the day, the evidence didn't wind up mattering because there was a fundamental large issue standing in the way of seeing the evidence," she said. "You had this enormous mistrust of everything LAPD, everything officer related."
  • "I think he's someone who is a danger to society," she said. "He was getting into one scrape after another after he was acquitted."
jongardner04

Nancy Reagan, former first lady, dies at the age of 94 | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Former first lady Nancy Reagan, known for her influence and devotion to President Ronald Reagan during his eight years in the White House and his decades outside it, died on Sunday at age 94.
  • Reagan will be buried at the presidential library next to her husband, Drake added. She said there will be an opportunity for members of the public to pay their respects before the funeral service.
  • As first lady, Reagan famously spearheaded the 1980s “Just Say No” campaign against drug abuse, speaking at schools around the country over several years and urging the United Nations to improve drug education. Although she earned scorn for her decision to expensively renovate the White House during a recession, she came to be revered for her work on social causes, particularly in the Republican party and among conservatives in general.
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  • “Nancy Reagan was totally devoted to President Reagan, and we take comfort that they will be reunited once more,” said Barbara Bush, wife of Reagan’s vice-president and successor, in a statement. “George and I send our prayers and condolences to her family.”
sgardner35

Marco Rubio's Policies Might Shut the Door to People Like His Grandfather - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • Marco Rubio’s Policies Might Shut the Door to People Like His Grandfather
  • Pedro Victor Garcia had left behind a home and a job with the government in communist Cuba, intent on never returning.
  • immigration officials stopped him.
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  • “I always thought of being here in the United States as a resident, living permanently here,” the slight 62-year-old grandfather, speaking through an interpreter, said at a hearing five weeks later.
  • The immigration officer was unmoved. He did not see an exiled family man — just someone who had no visa, worked for the Castro government and could pose a security risk.
  • “It is ordered that the applicant be excluded and deported from the United States,”
  • As he campaigns for president, Mr. Rubio, a Florida senator, says that the United States cannot accept refugees from Syria and Iraq because of the potential security risk
  • has called for a tightening of immigration law so that if the United States cannot identify with 100 percent certainty who immigrants are and why they want to enter, he says, “We’re not going to let you in.”
  • But under the stricter screening he now supports, his grandfather would most likely have been deported, depriving him of knowing the man he has called his mentor and closest boyhood friend.
  • Despite Mr. Garcia’s insistence that he was fleeing oppression, immigration officials raised suspicions that he might harbor communist sympathies, the records reveal.
  • In an interview, Mr. Rubio acknowledged that some would see a conflict between the stricter immigration and refugee policies he supports and his grandfather’s experience.
  • But Mr. Rubio said the difference between then and now is how much more sophisticated foreign infiltrators like the Islamic State have become, and how dangerous they are.
  • “I recognize that’s a valid point,” the senator said, “But what you didn’t have was a widespread effort on behalf of Fidel Castro to infiltrate into the United States killers who were going to detonate weapons and kill people.”
  • He says at the hearing that what made him decide he wanted to leave for the United States to join his wife and seven daughters, one of whom was Oria, Mr. Rubio’s now 85-year-old mother, was when Castro confirmed suspicions that he was a Marxist.
redavistinnell

Syrian Refugees Greeted by Justin Trudeau in Canada - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Syrian Refugees Greeted by Justin Trudeau in Canada
  • Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a battery of politicians from across the political spectrum were on hand at the Toronto airport to greet the refugees.
  • The widespread embrace of the plan by the Canadian public stands in stark contrast with the controversy raging over the issue in the United States, where many politicians, especially on the right, have called for bans or restrictions on the admission of Syrian refugees.
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  • The plan also appears to enjoy widespread public support. All of the refugees on the first flight have been sponsored to come to Canada, either by individual Canadians or by small groups. Sponsors have had to raise just over 28,000 Canadian dollars for each family.
  • “We suffered a lot,” said Kevork Jamkossian, who arrived with his wife, Georgina Zires, and their 16-month-old daughter, Madeleine. “Now, we feel as if we got out of hell and we came to paradise.”
  • To avoid a crush that might overwhelm the exhausted refugees, the government asked the public not to go the airport to see the flight arrive
  • The building has been converted into a special processing center, where arriving refugees will not only go through the usual customs, immigration and health screenings, but will also be given all of the other paperwork necessary for their new lives, including public health insurance cards
  • But 43 will be flying again on Friday, to meet sponsors in British Columbia or Alberta, and a small number will head to other parts of Ontario.
  • Some have already been arriving on scheduled commercial flights — some 400 since the Liberals took power last month. The government said earlier this week that more than 11,000 refugees’ applications had been processed, and that chartered civilian flights would be used for most of the airlift.
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